[Peace-discuss] She innocently asks:

[David Green]

The relationship between Howard Zinn and higher education personifies this as well.

DG



________________________________
From: C. G. Estabrook <galliher at illinois.edu>
To: David Green <davegreen84 at yahoo.com>
Cc: Peace Discuss <peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net>
Sent: Sun, February 7, 2010 12:17:44 PM
Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] She innocently asks:

My family has been involved with American colleges and universities for 350 years. Obviously, that fact gives me no special insight to the matter; it does direct my attention to it, though.

I've been an interested observer of US universities for no less than five decades myself, going off to college in the 1960s and thinking I'd been given the key to the candy store. "Bliss was it then to be alive..." (although I thought then and would probably think today that one of the most affecting accounts of that experience is contained in Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury). I couldn't imagine living in any other world, although I may have been better off if I could have.  Each time they threw me out I crawled back in, largely owing to a failure of imagination.

In my dotage I think perhaps too much is made of the matter.  It's hardly novel to think that academic intellectuals suffer from a certain narcissism, but I'm suggesting that we overrate the importance of colleges and universities. There's been a suspicion abroad for a while that they are largely irrelevant to the health of the polis.  Many of the great spirits of Euro-American intellectual history, from Erasmus to Marx, were thrown out of universities; others, from Shakespeare to Einstein, had minimal contact with them.  (Chomsky is a counter-example, more so as his linguistic work was originally funded by the military - although I don't doubt that he would have done it even if the Pentagon and MIT hadn't embraced him as the Spartan boy did the fox...)

On the negative side of the ledger is the fact that the primary effect of the modern US university system is the inculcation of regime-supporting intellectual conformity. While it's true that university-based critiques of government policy 40 years ago made a big difference, having been there I know that fewer people were involved than later said they were.  It was always a minority phenomenon.

More importantly, what survey data we have show that support for the USG position in regard to the Vietnam War was positively, not negatively, correlated with years of formal education.  The more schooling you'd had, the more likely you were likely to support the US war in Vietnam (although non-support included the "win-or-get-out" position). US education was doing its job.

The two great ideological institutions of the 20th-century US - the university and the press - look like being about to undergo substantial changes. That may be no bad thing.  --CGE



David Green wrote:
> "...does the profit motive pervert the mission of ...universities?"
>  An obfuscationist NYT book review that manages to avoid mentioning the relationship between higher education and military research. We are instructed to believe that the problem is one of harmony between publicly funded research and private profit.
>  http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/07/books/review/Goldin-t.html?ref=books&pagewanted=print <http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/07/books/review/Goldin-t.html?ref=books&pagewanted=print>
>  DG



      
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